Independence Day: Resurgence: The Official Movie Novelization (6 page)

None of them knew what was happening. Was it a black hole, suddenly born out of nothing? It didn’t look right—or at least it didn’t look like what they had theorized a black hole should look like. It was irregular, for one thing, seeming like a tear or a wound in space-time rather than a clean circular singularity.

But what, then? What had caused it?

That was a question for the scientists to wrestle with later, Valeri thought. When he’d seen the drifting ice crystals at first, he’d thought it was strange. When he’d felt the lightness in his step on the way back to the base, he’d thought it was his imagination. Then when he’d seen the ripple in space he hadn’t known what to think.

As it grew, he started to understand—deep in his gut, where real intuition lived—that something very bad was about to happen. He just hoped they were going to live. They still hadn’t been able to communicate with any of the other human bases in the system. No one knew what was happening to them.

Would they ever know? The tug would get them back to Earth, but it would take a long time, and they didn’t have enough room for supplies. So even if they got away from this maelstrom, unless they could reestablish communications, they were going to be in real trouble.

He forced himself into the front part of the passenger area, trying to peer out of the window and get a look at the distortion. All of the seats were filled and people were jammed throughout the tug, holding onto whatever they could grab.

“Hurry!” Belyaev shouted. The ship shook as he fired the engines, trying to hold it steady against the vortex’s increasing gravitation pull. “Prepare for immediate takeoff!”

The last cosmonaut was in, and the tug’s airlock slammed shut. Belyaev lifted off in a storm of flying construction materials mingled with pieces of ice and stone from Rhea’s surface. They banged off the shuttle’s hull, none of them hard enough to do much damage, but Valeri jumped every time. It was easy to die in space.

He thought of home. He thought of Kiev, and Natasha. He wanted to have children. Right then, he wanted to go back to Earth, put his feet on the ground, and never get on an airplane or a spaceship again. These last few hours had been enough adventure for a lifetime, and it wasn’t over yet.

The ship bucked and shuddered. Belyaev held it steady for the moment. Sparks shot from conduits in the walls behind the pilot’s chair. The tug was built to haul heavy loads, and it had enough power to escape the gravity wells of any planet in the solar system—but the engines were straining, and they weren’t getting much farther away from the hole.

Below them, the entire base tore apart as it was uprooted from the surface. Modular structures that had held living quarters, machine shops, the greenhouse… all of them tumbled past the ship and broke into pieces as they accelerated into the distortion. Valeri watched a table soccer set spin by, along with a hydroponics bay with fresh tomatoes still sprouting from its mesh. The transformer he had been working on shot past, followed by the crane from the construction site, a seven-meter beam still attached to its hook assembly. Someone’s bed, someone else’s footlocker. All of it now space debris, and space itself rippled around the vortex.

Incredulous, Valeri saw the nearest of Saturn’s rings sprouting a tail of debris, drawn by the gravitational pull of this new wound in space. Whatever the phenomenon was, its power was incredible, far beyond his ability to fully comprehend. His mind returned to the idea of a black hole springing into existence, even though he knew it wasn’t possible.

There was nothing else to which he could compare it.

“Give me more thrust!” Commander Belyaev shouted.

The technician in the copilot’s chair worked the controls as fast as he could.

“We’re at maximum output, sir!”

The tug’s frame groaned under the stresses between its engines and the opposing gravity. Smaller cracking sounds made a terrifying counterpoint. If they could get around to the other side of Rhea, Valeri thought, the mass of the moon would protect them for long enough that they could get away. Gravity diminished quickly with distance.

Belyaev seemed to have the same thought. Instead of steering the tug straight away from the vortex, he kept it at a low angle of ascent. The chunks of the moon flying past them grew to the size of hills. The moon itself was beginning to break apart. Valeri remembered the first time he had seen Rhea, wondering what was inside of it. Was it dead, ice and rock all the way through? Or did the pressures deep inside create heat? Measurements from the surface had been uncertain, and the Russian team had orders to build ESD defense turrets, not indulge their astrogeological curiosity. Valeri had a feeling they might find out shortly, though.

As the tug turned away, it rolled to the right and he saw geysers erupting through the mile-wide cracks in Rhea’s surface. There it was. Confirmation of a subsurface ocean. The scientifically curious child in him was glad to see it, glad to be in on one of the solar system’s mysteries. The adult in him looked forward to sharing the story over a glass of vodka back home.

The tug slewed to one side, slamming the cosmonauts against each other. As Rhea broke up, its gravitational pull was lessened and became unbalanced. Suddenly Belyaev was fighting different attractions from different directions.

He was a superb pilot. He had survived dogfights in the War of ’96, claiming four confirmed alien kills and two other probables. He had flown interplanetary missions, had landed on the Moon, Mars, and Rhea. He had overseen docking operations with an asteroid mining station. Belyaev could fly anything.

Even he couldn’t fly a ship straight, though, when the very space around it was being torn apart. The tug started to tumble. The groans in its hull turned into screams. Alarm klaxons went off, warning of leaks. Emergency oxygen pumps kicked in. The cosmonauts sat silent, relying on their commander to get them out of this. They could scream, they could thrash around, they could panic… but what good would it do?

Space flashed by the windows, and then the surface of Rhea as Belyaev shouted orders. The copilot fired impulse thrusters to arrest their tumble, but it was too violent, the forces around them too great. The moon passed through their view again. It was in fragments, torn completely into pieces. Liquid water, freezing rapidly, sped through space toward the distortion. It was one of the most beautiful things Valeri had ever seen, striking in the way the light caught the water in space, and then how that light changed when the water froze…

Then the tug was shaking too violently for Valeri to see. Belyaev was still shouting and the rest of the cosmonauts held their silence. Abruptly a loud metallic scream from the back of the ship got Valeri’s attention. He turned, and was looking out into empty space. Instinctively he grabbed a handrail. The ship’s atmosphere gusted past him, the cosmonauts screaming now but their voices growing thin as the air fled. Some of them were gone through the hole in the hull, others hanging onto the broken edges.

More of the ship broke away. Through a hole Valeri could see one of its thrusters. The other had been torn off. Valeri held the rail with one hand and the trailing edge of a suit harness with the other. Whoever had been in that seat was gone now.

The violence of the spinning began to disorient him, and he realized he had been holding his breath for a long time. He wanted to breathe again, but there was nothing to breathe.

Belyaev was gone too, the cockpit windows shattered and the two command chairs empty.

The last thing Valeri saw, as the ship disintegrated around him, was the majestic rings of Saturn, tearing themselves apart.

Jake held the tug steady. Charlie was still rambling about surfing and parties and women and whatever else. He had an active imagination. One of the things he imagined was that he was a ladies’ man.

“You realize there’s only thirty-six women on this Moon Base?” he said, and Jake was sure it was true. Charlie would know. The question was, how did he know? Had he counted them? Had he hacked the personnel database to find out? Either was possible.

“I’m sure one of them will eventually come around, pal,” he said just to be supportive.

Charlie turned to glare at him. “Hey! It’s not like they all rejected me. I happen to have standards.”

Standards
, Jake reflected.
Good thing to have. If it wasn’t for standards, I’d still be in the hybrid fighter program. I screwed up. That was that.

There was a flare of static over the radio and the voices from the command center cut out for a moment. Jake and Charlie winced at the sharp spike of white noise. The lights on the tug’s navigation console flickered, went out… then came back on, still flickering.

The tug dropped and pitched forward as the signals to its engines were interrupted, and with an awful grinding squeal the tug’s crane arms plowed into the cannon.

“What did you do?” Jake shouted.

Charlie was working the console. “Nothing!”

“That didn’t feel like nothing!”

Jake tried to get the tug back under control. The radio feed from inside the base command center came back on, and a tech was shouting.

“Tug Ten collided with the weapon! It’s listing!”

Everyone in the command center was shouting. Jake heard another engineer say, “The clamps have stopped—they’re not responding!”

As he got the tug level and stationary again, Jake saw that this was true. The clamps hadn’t closed all the way, and the huge turret, the size of a small hill, was starting to tip toward the lunar base. The Moon’s gravity was only one-sixth as strong as Earth’s, so the cannon wasn’t falling fast, but it was still falling, and when it landed…

“Override the system!” Commander Lao bellowed. Then his voice got louder as he spoke directly into the microphone. “All tugs, take evasive action!”

The cannon gathered momentum, its huge mass accelerating it downward. On Earth it already would have landed, crushing much of the base, but the slowness of gravitational acceleration on the Moon meant they still had a chance to act.

“That’s a negative, sir!” Jake shouted.

Charlie’s eyes popped. “What do you mean
negative
?”

Jake gunned the tug’s engines and dropped between the toppling cannon and the command center.

This is all Charlie’s fault
, he thought furiously.
If I hadn’t paid attention when he helped me study, I wouldn’t know all the basic physics. I wouldn’t know that the cannon would fall slower in this gravity. I wouldn’t know all that crap about how every action has an equal and opposite reaction. And I sure as
hell
never would’ve had a stupid idea like this.

As the tug angled around, they came close enough to the command center’s bay windows that they could see Lao’s astonished face. Charlie caught the commander’s eye and shrugged.

Sure
, Jake thought.
Throw me under the bus.

“Morrison!” Lao barked into the microphone. “Get out of there! That’s an order!”

Jake toggled the radio off. He had to concentrate.

“Charlie, strap in.”

“So we’re not even gonna talk about this?” Charlie yelled, but he strapped in, all right, and Jake swung the tug around so it faced the cannon—which was about halfway through its fall that would end in dozens of deaths, and billions of dollars in damage. Plus who knew how long it would take to repair everything and get the cannon defense-ready? Someone had to do something.

That someone was Jake. He flipped the tug’s arms around so they faced forward, spread wide like the arms of a wrestler ready to engage an opponent, and then he rammed the thruster control all the way forward. The engines roared and the tug leapt ahead. It wasn’t built for speed, so “leapt” was kind of relative, but they sure were moving fast—directly at the cannon.

“This isn’t a fighter, Jake!” Charlie screamed.

“Don’t remind me!” Actually, Jake thought, it was a good thing it wasn’t a fighter. A fighter would go real fast, and then blow itself to tiny little pieces doing what he was about to do with this tug.

The cannon grew in their windows, huge and terrifying and approaching way too fast—and then they collided with it in a shower of sparks and an impact that rocked both of them forward in their harnesses. Jake heard all kinds of popping and snapping noises as little things inside the tug’s hull and in the control arms broke under the impact. But the arms held, locked against the turret just above where Jake had gauged its center of gravity to be.

“We’re gonna die,” Charlie moaned. “This is how I die!”

Jake wasn’t sure he was wrong. He held the tug’s thrusters at maximum power, listening to the echoing groans of overstressed metal, feeling the heavy vibrations of two huge forces opposing each other—the tug’s thrust against the cannon’s angular momentum. The tug wasn’t built for speed, but it was built to move large masses from place to place. Warning lights flashed in the cockpit as the engines started to overheat.

“Come on! Come on!” Jake said, holding the thrust and hoping the engines could last just a little bit longer.

The cannon started to slow.

The sounds coming from the front of the tug and from the arms weren’t good, though. Either this was going to work in the next few seconds, or the cannon’s fall would make Jake and Charlie the smeared middle of a sandwich, with the cannon on top and the wreckage of the command center on the bottom.

The cannon slowed a little more, and the engines still held. Hydraulic fluid and sparks shot and spewed from the crane arms, but they held, too. Jake had a feeling they were smashed into place and would never operate again, but replacement crane arms were a hell of a lot easier to come by than replacement moon bases.

Charlie tapped the control to activate the radio again, so they could hear whether it was working. From the inside of the tug, it looked as if it was. They couldn’t really see anything beyond the instruments, however, which said they were moving forward at the glacial pace of a few meters per second.

Still, they were moving forward.

The tug pushed the immense cannon slowly back into place. Over the comm link, they could hear techs shouting about getting the remote turret systems back online. The cannon reached its tipping point and settled back into the mount as slowly and ominously as it had toppled out.